Sunday, March 19, 2017

Well, I wonder how may people still follow this spot? I'm so bad at this. Sorry for the lack of updates here. Almost an entire year without nothing.Truth is, I had nothing noteworthy to post on since the release of Baxter's Venture on Steam, save for my love of gaming, which at my age of 36 is starting to wane. As for projects, there were way too many ideas that I had sitting around and started tackling them one by one, but sadly after weighing time and energy, and lack of resources those projects found themselves scrapped or placed on hiatus.Hard part is accepting a small truth, that I'm just not THAT into game developing anymore. I'm more of a cartoonist than a game artist, and while I did get to dabble in some programming and developing with Baxter stuff, I lost so much interest. It really is a rough field for indies with no real solid backing. Also, marketing is my weakest point. I've paid a small media group for some exposure for one of my games, and I didn't see jack from them so that's a hundred bucks wasted. I think all they did was one tweet... I don't recall, but that was just a waste and a bit of a scam if you ask me. The mobile market is now overrun by big corporate freemiums. Flappy Bird only got popular because of Pewdiepie, and if you really want monetary success, develop for Apple... which requires you to own a Mac, an iPhone/Pad, and a yearly dev fee. So that's about two grand easy. Now, despite me having a full time job and all, debt is a bitch. College debt and medical both. I also live in Arizona, not a good state for high paying work unless you want to work 12 hour shifts as a nurse, and I'm not fond of the medical field. Google, is just not that good for making a profit. Near every google user, from research, wants their apps for free. It's also pirated to hell and back. If you can get ads on your game then great, but you have to keep updating your game every time there are changes.Like if you develop games on Construct 2, and google changes something your game may not even run. This is another hurdle I keep running into. I loved working in C2, but good God I'm baffled with Scirra's decision making. Building a game making software using browser tech... I, I thought I believed in that vision but it's so volatile and unpredictable you can't make something simple with it. It might run on one person's machine, but another will have struggles. I'm not so sure I could keep using it, tried learning Unity and GameMaker but C2 spoiled me so much it's tough to learn something new when there is no drive for it. This is a hard pill to swallow after so much hype, but I think it's safe for me to say that my passion for game developing has dwindled. It's not dead, but I can't force myself to create something I have no personal investment in.Which brings me to my latest bit of news... so remember that horror game idea I kept tossing around and doing nothing with? Well, I finally did something with it. It's a book!

Yeah, even I didn't see this coming but eventually I thought "why the hell not?". The biggest challenge was changing the story. Originally, the game would run similar to the likes of Slenderman and Outlast, exploring a haunted high school with a couple creeps and ghost out to kill/scare you. You solve a mystery on how the school came to be and confront the killer himself. It's mostly stealth, jumpscares, and collecting pages of the killer's manifesto, which you need at least 40 pages to "complete" it. There's lots of scary hallucinations, nightmares, and creepy imagery that I took advantage of in here. Also, my dire hatred of growing up in Kingman, Az and some of it's people that made my life miserable at a time. Never realized how that actually gave me so much to work with!Right now it's finished, save for some revisions and lots of proofreading errors I've found. So I'm doing my best to market the hell out of this book, via facebook, twitter, and instagram, and some other avenues until I get just enough buzz before publishing this on Amazon (and any other publishing venues if they're free). A part of me really hopes this does much better than my indie game works. The whole change from GG-Works to Glendemonium reflects this as I don't want to have just one thing I do, but a multitude of things.Another avenue I'm pondering is podcasting, but what would I talk about? Not sure how people think about opinion pages. After all I'm just a guy on the internet, not really famous or have some kind of following. Guess instead if thinking I should just do, right?I'll dedicated another blog post later this week to Creeper High, and what drove the inspiration behind this chilling mystery! Stay tuned.